Liturgies of the Self: Contemporary American Cult Fiction, Identity, and Narrative Evangelism

Author

Kerry Hillis Goff

Date

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

English

Committee Chair

Theron Britt

Committee Member

Carey Mickilites

Committee Member

Donal Harris

Committee Member

Verner Mitchell

Abstract

“Liturgies of the Self: Contemporary American Cult Fiction, Identity, and Narrative Evangelism,” examines how American novels from 1980 to the present stage cultic logic as a cultural grammar of belonging. Across two cohorts—1980–2000 and 2001–present—the project demonstrates how narratives of consumerism, violence, embodiment, race, and simulation reveal identity as liturgical performance rather than autonomous selfhood. The first cohort—Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989)—dramatizes cultic rituals through spectacle, grotesque display, and overt performance. DeLillo stages consumer spectacle as collective liturgy; Palahniuk imagines masculine salvation through bodily sacrifice; Ellis explores the surface conformity of late-capitalist aesthetics; Coupland enacts ironic withdrawal as a strategy of belonging; and Dunn reframes family and the body as sites of grotesque devotion. Reading through Linda Hutcheon’s analysis of parody and pastiche, these novels expose how postmodern irony functions as both critique and complicity, parodying cultural rituals even as they reproduce them. Though differing in emphasis, each novel concludes in collapse—apocalypse, suicide, or ironic dissolution—underscoring the inescapability of cultic structures at the end of the twentieth century. The second cohort—Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015), Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (2017), Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X (2019), and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black (2018)—extends this genealogy into the twenty-first century, revealing how cultic logic mutates within digital, aesthetic, and racial economies. Here, rituals are less spectacular and more algorithmic, internalized, or aestheticized: racial identity becomes branded and commodified in Everett’s satire of authenticity; consumer mimicry dissolves autonomy into simulation in Kleeman; gendered abjection inscribes bodies as sites of ritual sacrifice in Machado; grotesque inheritance ritualizes intergenerational trauma in Etter; and consumer violence fuses with racial spectacle as dystopian liturgy in Adjei-Brenyah. These narratives end not in cataclysm but in absorption—intertextuality, ghosting, grotesque permanence, or recursive violence—marking a cultural shift from collapse to containment, from destruction to perpetual devotion. The project employs a critical framework drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories of discipline and confession, Jean Baudrillard’s account of simulation and hyperreality, Fredric Jameson’s cultural logic of late capitalism, Julia Kristeva’s abjection, and Edward Bernays’s insights on desire and propaganda. Hutcheon’s postmodern parody clarifies the instability of representation; W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of signifying illuminates the racial and performative dimensions of selfhood. Together, these theorists provide conceptual vocabulary for understanding how cult fiction enacts the logics of power, performance, and consumption across eras. Though these frameworks take very distinctive directions as cultural and narrative criticisms, they often converge to reveal a three-dimensional look at the types of narratives and deliveries each book provides. Furthermore, by theorizing cult fiction as an ongoing mode rather than a historical subgenre, this dissertation argues that narrative itself operates as a form of (cult)ural evangelism—shaping devotion, scripting identity, and generating cultic readerships. In tracing the evolution of these literary liturgies from postmodern collapse to post digital absorption, the project illuminates how a body of contemporary American fiction translates the rituals of belonging that define the self in late-capitalist culture.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest/Clarivate.”

Notes

Open Access

Recommended Citation

Goff, Kerry Hillis, "Liturgies of the Self: Contemporary American Cult Fiction, Identity, and Narrative Evangelism" (2026). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3933.
https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/etd/3933